How it works: With their new “TrueView” Video Ads viewers can choose to skip a video ad after 5 seconds, and you only pay when the viewer has watched the full ad or 30 seconds, whichever is shorter.

One may think that everyone and their mother would skip the ads right off the bat but YouTube has tested the ad format across thousands of viewer hours, serving millions of video views from a wide range of advertisers. What they found was view-through rates of 20-70% which is pretty outstanding.

This is a good thing for advertisers for a couple of reasons. The most obvious is that you only pay when your whole message is viewed. Secondarily, those viewers have essentially “opted-in” to seeing your ad, meaning that it’s relevant to them, thus increasing the probability that the viewer will retain the information or even take a buying action.